Making the most of The Great Outdoors:- Cycling- Backpacking- Walking- Camping and Caravanning
in 'Eva the Eriba' my Eriba Touring Troll 540.
Travelling at the Speed of Life because everyday is a holiday...........

Sunday, 21 August 2016

Not Had Enough Time.......

Over the past few weeks since my last blog post it seems that I have not had enough time to do everything that I have wanted so my posts (or lack of) have suffered.This retirement lark is pretty time consuming......With the good weather that we have been enjoying Anne and I have been out on walks and other trips around the Welsh border country.....(And then don't forget there has been fitting in my bike rides as well).Obviously I have a number of images captured on our little day trips and I will share them with you over time but to start off here are some shots below of a couple of places that captured our interest......First of all on one of our walks around a country park only a couple of miles from our campsite we came across this cave carved out of the rock....Apparently a few hundred years ago a local Highwayman by the name of Humphrey Kynaston lived here with his horse.....From the location of the cave he had a good view of the road to Shrewsbury and was able to see when a likely wealthy traveller was making their way along the road....it was easy pickings for HK and he managed to make a good living from his criminal activities for a number of years....In more recent times..about one hundred years ago.... a family of nine lived in the cave...If you check out the steps leading up to the entrance of the cave you can see the years of use have worn away the steps to quite some degree....Now a nice solid cave could be quite a good place to live to my mind.... Good shelter from the extremes of weather and no worries about it being blown away by strong winds....The powers that be these days have placed a steel door and bars at the window of the cave as you can see in order to prevent anyone getting inside...this is obviously done under the guise of 'Health and Safety'. It seems it is deemed better for anyone homeless to live in a cardboard box on the streets than to be reasonably warm and dry in a nice solid cave....When on some long distance backpacking trips in the past I have slept in a couple of caves and have always found them to be a pretty near ideal place to spend the night....Anyway I digress....

Humphrey Kynaston's Cave

These next couple of images are of Whittington Castle which is situated just a few miles from the small town of Oswestry.....The castle has been revovated and is run on a day to day basis by volunteers from Whittington village.....They run the small cafe and shop and entry to the castle and grounds is free...

Whittington Castle with moat

Front view of Whittington Castle

I was chatting to one of the castle volunteers and she told me that they do very well as a wedding venue....I must say that the castle and grounds would make a great backdrop for those all important wedding photos.......